improved the message visibility of [4] since I converted it to a large modal message which the user can't miss

made sure the content of [3] is simple and standard

My target audience is not tech savvy so I'm afraid that they don't understand the content of [4].

How could I improve the message? Would including the user's email address in the message make it clearer or worst? e.g:

Instructions on how to activate your account have beem emailed to your joe.doe@gmail.com email.

I've even thought of going wild and making the user's email in the message an active link pointing to the mail provider page (e.g joe.doe@gmail.com would point to http://gmail.com/) to make it even easier for the user but that would probably be too risky.

Note that I haven't got too many registrations per day to run an A/B test (Google WebsiteOptimizer style) to test the performance of different messages so I'm doing 100% guesswork here.

Also I'd love to go the verify later route but in this case it's not possible.

6 Answers
6

Instructions on how to activate your
account have beem emailed to you.
Please check your email.

The word "instructions" may be scary to some people. It makes activation sound more complicated than it is. I'd suggest changing the message to this:

Almost done...

We've sent an email to
joe.doe@gmail.com. Open it up to
activate your account.

A couple of reasons for this:

"Almost done..." is an attention grabber that makes it obvious that they're not done.

The activation process really is dead simple. You could be verbose and list the steps. But it'd be kind of like the instructions for pop tarts -- it's really unnecessary. In this case I think it's better to simply state their next step.

And I have one more suggestion. You mentioned that this appears as a modal message. This may be part of the problem. People have a tendency to close modal messages or dialog boxes without reading what they say. If you instead add the message inline with the rest of the page (and make it stand out), then it might work better.

Fantastic! I love the rewording and the reasoning behind it. Regarding the modal, it used to look like stackexchange's or twitter's style of messages (100% width, strong background, fixed positioning on top) but I changed it to modal to grab the user's attention and it actually did improve my conversions (from registration to activation).
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cherouvimMar 14 '11 at 7:03

@cherouvim - It's been a couple months. I'm curious what changes you've made and if you've observed any improvement.
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Steve WorthamMay 6 '11 at 18:03

4

I used your exact message in a modal. The registered-but-not-activated users dropped to 5-10% and before this they where around 25-30%. Your advice was simply superb. Thanks again.
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cherouvimMay 6 '11 at 19:43

All these are great suggestions. Thanks a lot. In particilar the 4th in which my system currently suffers (new activation or password reset links cancel the old ones and this can be very bad for the users).
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cherouvimMar 14 '11 at 16:05

@cherouvim: I expected that from the typical implementation (have a single field, rather than a list, of activation links), and the struggles I had with this on different sites when mail delivery is delayed. --- A simple solution would be to re-send the previous activation link, or one that looks different but still matches the DB key.
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peterchenMar 14 '11 at 17:18

I'd improve a little on your idea of using the user's email address to point to their webmail, by providing a call-to-action button within the message. Not a link, but a big fat shiny button "Go to Gmail". Come to think of it, it's a nice way to phish :).

Maybe you can also insert a screenshot in the message, showing the email with an arrow pointing at the link inside, but that's probably overdoing it.

Also, in the email body, you should also use a call-to-action. Make the "click here" a link as well, and put the actual link in parentheses after the text.
"To activate your account please click here (or point your browser to http://www.foobar.com/a/sdj923ujf845)".

It's a nice thought, but it's really wordy to do explain you're reasoning for things like this. First, the reason for activation is probably not what people are getting hung up on. And even if it was, long instructions like this should not be at the forefront of the UI (or even a modal dialog box). It's just too much to read.
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Steve WorthamMar 13 '11 at 20:30